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Cryptocurrency Miners Are 'Limiting' the Search For Alien Life Now (vice.com)
Since the latest graphics processing units (GPUs) are so popular with cryptocurrency miners, the SETI project -- short for "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" -- can't find the graphics cards it needs to expand its operations. The SETI@home project helps provide some computing power, as it involves thousands of volunteers who turn the power of their computers over to the project, but it's only a portion of the SETI project's total computing power. Motherboard reports: Searching the stars is intense work that "uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space." Analyzing all of the data from these telescopes uses a lot of computing power. "We'd like to use the latest GPUs and we can't get 'em," Dan Werthimer, chief scientist of SETI, told the BBC. "That's limiting our search for extraterrestrials." Manufacturers such as Nvidia are struggling to keep up with demand for graphics cards. It recently told investors it would rise to meet its manufacturing challenge while focusing on its core market -- gamers. It even suggested vendors limit purchases of graphics cards from individual buyers in an effort to stop miners from buying up all the cards. "This is a new problem, it's only happened on orders we've been trying to make in the last couple of months," Werthimer told the BBC. "We've got the money, we've contacted the vendors, and they say, 'we just don't have them.'"
"We've got the money, we've contacted the vendors, and they say, 'we just don't have them.'"
Offer more money and more hardware will get manufactured.
Ezekiel 23:20
- answered. They're all too busy mining cryptocurrency. Good lord! Charles Stross was right!
Wow
Crypto-currency Craze 'Hinders Search For Alien Life'
Posted by msmash on Wednesday February 14, 2018 @01:10PM from the demand-and-supply dept.
This is a duplicate of this story
I agree about cryptocurrency, but I fail to understand why you think that discovering signs of aliens would be no use to humanity. Sure, its not going to affect you on a day to day basic, but it means life has arisen elsewhere and this in turn will influence scientific thoughts about biology and its origins. A lot of science is blue sky research that may lead nowhere, that doesn't make it pointless.
There are a ton of cheap FPGA boards left out there that were used for Bitcoin mining. Why not repurpose them? I can pick a decent one on Ebay for $60-100.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
The other post is still on the front page. I know it's too much to ask 'editors' to check in the archives that a story hasn't been posted, but not even reading the front page of the site that you're working for? Why is BeauHD still employed?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's entirely possible that such a discovery could be extremely useful to humanity. Suppose we detect some stream of data being transmitted that contains huge amounts of information about an advanced civilization. Might give us an insight into technological advances not yet thought of.
Why should aliens pack their information into narrow bandwidth signals?
Isn't that just an artifact of how *we* conceived radio roughly 100 years ago?
Perhaps to them some signal extremely spread over spectrum would make more sense. Granted, detectors and "demodulators" would have to look radically different than ours do, but just imagine an extremely wide wavelet modulation and a fractal active antenna or something...
Create a cryptocurency SETIcoin, where the miners has to search aliens in order to get coins.
... (hot mic) "And am I glad this happened. I get the press off my case for a few days."
Everybody *knows* that with absolute certainty and no doubt at all so we should close down SETI because we all know it serves no purpose and never will.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It would be nice to think that, but we have enough trouble decoding stuff written in unknown languages by ancient humans and they thought it the same way and had the same concepts about the world as us. I suspect trying to decode something sent by aliens would be orders of magnitude harder.
because aliens have already been found - they populate most of the political scene in the West. Wherever you look - Obama, Trump, Junckers etc These alien parasites destroy our countries and nobody cares. That is a much bigger problem. Come to think of it: contrary to what SETI is, political elite being all aliens is an actual problem.
If you can even identify it, right? Seems a bit like ants suddenly discovering how to read English. And even that requires having an awareness and understanding of "meaningful concepts", let alone those from a human context. Unless we receive a signal from a relatively evenly-matched civilization in terms of advancement, it's likely we won't even be aware it occurred at all.
People will rent out part of their brain to mine cryptocurrencies as it will be one of the last jobs remaining for unskilled workers.
The really poor will rent out so much that they don't understand any longer how badly they are done by.
It doesn't do any good for anyone else..
I've often thought it needs a tax, not for the tax man or the government etc but a do something useful tax, like a 25% gpu power lent to seti or computational chemistry etc Actually do something good for the planet.
They could be used to process the incredibly large number of stories on Slashdot to detect dupes instead.
Searching for "alien life" is probably one of the most useless human activities ever invented. I hate to have to say this, but we are the Universe asking itself what it is, and I seriously doubt that the Universe has multiple personalities asking the same question.
E Proelio Veritas.
Not even the editors.
Nvidia is working on releasing headless mining cards to curb the price gouging on current GPU's, and most of the naive people who are eventually going to give up once they realize that their 12 GPU rig they paid $15,000 for isn't going to make them fast money. * With the current GPU prices, I'd say you have a better chance of making some money buying Nvidia stock.
Say I have a GPU farm, and energy to spare. I can run packets for SETI, which means zero return, or I can mine a cryptocurrency, which only is going up in value, where exponential growth is pretty much guaranteed, and if there is a correction, it goes back up (BTC was in the 8k range yesterday, now should be going over the five digit mark today.)
With the fact that people are using BTC as a store of value because fiat currencies can't be trusted (just wait until the Petro-yuan goes live), it only is going to go up. There are no more Bitcoins being added, and demand will always be high, so what shifts between 8-20k today will be shifting between 250k-300k in a year.
If it means exponential return rates, fuck the alien signals.
We just don't find so many aliens these days, 'cause of all the crypto mining.
But seriously...for all we know all our searching is messing alien navigation systems and killing them off.
More important the search for alien life over GPU number crunching will only become more likely with crypto. Older GPUs less capable of keeping up with mining difficulty will become a second-hand bargain.
No one is stopping people from dedicating resources to the unlikely pursuit of searching for aliens as opposed to having a calculated return.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Now we have to watch out, aliens could come to Earth undetected and mine all our cryptocurrency.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
With a delay of year or two there will be an excess of cheap used GPU-s, overall the alien searchers can get more computed even if it means delay of 1-2 years. For a long term project like that, such a delay doesn't really matter.
I thought people decided not to look too hard anymore after John Hurt found those eggs on LV-426.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
SETI isn't merely a waste of time which fortunately is incredibly unlikely to find any aliens even if they do exist. If SETI succeeds, it's a serious threat to the existence of Humanity as we know it:
As soon as an alien contact will be found, no embargo would hold - every crazed nut will broadcast to the aliens. Eventually, someone would annoy the aliens or accidentally contact the universe's bad guys, and then we're done for.
If SETI@Home were to build a DAPP, then SETI@Home could run on the ethereum blockchain.
Yeah! We'll mine for Starbucks. Surely that name isn't taken :)
You need to drink a cup of coffee to clear your mind. Starbucks is a name already taken. It was a major character in Battlestar Galactica.
You spelled "Moby Dick" wrong.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The big difference is that anything sent by aliens would be meant for us to understand. The problem with ancient human languages is we only have fragments and they weren't talking to us so they didn't try to leave us any clues. Also all we have is written words of ancient humans, whereas aliens would likely send us video, which makes the rest of the learning pretty easy (once you figure out how they encoded the video, which they will attempt to convey).
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Russian Hackers Are Aliens. SETI and Bitcoin Unite Forces!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I am not an expert here, but there seems to be a ready made way to mash the cryto frenzy with the needs of the scientific community. For every "hit" on a point of interest by a distributed network of mining cards, give the hitter a fancy new digital coin. "SETI-coin" can be the new craze and actually use the processing power to use, instead of just burning it on worthless calculations.
Add a financial " prize " for computing X number of cycles or blocks in the SETI project and folks will be more than happy to help you out.
( assuming your prize >= crypto currency mining )
I'm all for SETI. I've supported them in the past, I've contributed dollars and cycles and time and effort.
But there's absolutely zero chance that SETI can produce any return to anyone alive today.
Even if tomorrow, SETI discovers a guaranteed civilization, identical to ours, it would change absolutely nothing in our lives.
How many decades will it take to say "hi" back? Let alone get any real response of value.
Between language barriers, distance barriers, culture barriers, and who knows what other barriers, I'd wager it'll take twenty years just to get a mutually confirmed "we both exist". Make that fifty years before we get anything fun, like digital artwork. Make that at least two hundred years before we get anything physical. Call it 150 years with technological improvements over time. Call it 125 years if we meet them half-way.
In any event, I'm long dead, you're long dead, and it didn't matter to begin with.
SETI's a great goal, and a wonderful effort, and it isn't worth supplanting literally ANYTHING else, no matter how trivial.
The ETs have been monitoring our electromagnetic communications since we discovered how to communicate that way.
During some decades since then, they've been encouraged at our progress (civil rights movement, for instance -- even if that was offset by the Vietnam 'war').
But since January 2016, they've seen we've moved backwards by leaps and bounds, back towards a new Dark Age -- and they are disappointed in us, now.
As a result, they'll continue to hide from us, cloak their own electromagnetic emissions, so we can't determine if they exist or not.
If we keep this negative progress up, they may just build their own 'wall', to prevent us from escaping our solar system and infecting the rest of our galaxy.
So, for now, there is no point in searching for ET; they don't want to be found, not by violent, wilfully ignorant cavemen such as ourselves.
Got into a debate with my brother about crypto currencies. He was appalled about how much power they use globally. He's kind of an eco-nut.
There are has statistics about SETI@Home like "Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time..... With over 145,000 active computers in the system (1.4 million total) in 233 countries, as of 23 June 2013, SETI@home had the ability to compute over 668 teraFLOPS."
Buuuut, how much power consumption is that? And I've really no idea about how much power consumption lies behind all the servers processing VISA transactions, or Amazon's servers.
I do think that people who use illegal and/or non-prescribed drugs are personally and mentally weak. If you can't deal with your life without using drugs, there is something wrong with you and your life and you should change yourself and/or your life.
Spoken with the compassion that the right wing became famous for. 'My life is good, and fuck anyone who wasn't lucky enough to be born with my genes/family/environment'.
Look asshole, nobody is asking you to devote your life to the orphans of Calcutta, but why don't you try to show some decency to people who aren't as fortunate as you? Do you really think that people actively choose to be come habitual drug users? Really?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Why are GPUs even used? I thought custom ASIC boards outperformed GPUs so much they were relegated to the same garbage pile as CPUs.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Sounds like a beggar complaining about the $20 you gave them last week not being enough
They and the companies putting together the graphics cards are unwilling to bet on a future mining crazy and make enough graphics cards as is because if it ends then what are they going to do with all the excess cards? Plus all the used ones entering the market?
Nvidia can keep up with demand but does it make economical sense to produce even more?
I make lots of bitcoin transactions.
In a command economy, when more people want what you want, it makes it harder to get it.
In a market economy, when more people want what you want, it makes it easier to get.
Eventually. Waiting for the ramp-up can be a drag, sometimes.
But it sure beats the hell out of fighting or pleading to get it. And is even better still than fighting or pleading, and not getting it.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.